Andrew Glassner is a Senior Research Scientist at Weta Digital, where he works on applying deep learning to the production of visual effects for movies and television.

Glassner has served as Papers Chair of the SIGGRAPH '94 Papers Committee, Founding Editor of the Journal of Computer Graphics Tools, and Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Graphics. Andrew is a well-known writer of numerous technical papers and books. Among his books include the "Graphics Gems" series, and the two-volume text "Principles of Digital Image Synthesis." His most recent book is "Deep Learning: A Visual Approach." He has carried out research at the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab, Xerox PARC, Microsoft Research, and Weta Digital.

Glassner has written and directed live-action and animated films, written novels and screenplays, and was creator-writer-director of an online multiplayer murder-mystery game for The Microsoft Network.

In his spare time, Andrew paints, plays and writes music, and hikes.

David Minor is an R&D Visual Effects developer who has worked on films like Inception, Elysium and Avengers: Infinity War. His current areas of interest are physics-based simulation for character effects and machine learning for production and real-time applications.

James Hursthouse is a twenty-year veteran of the global games, digital media and technology sectors. He has experience and proven success across content development and publishing, infrastructure and technology for 'games as a service', and more recently with new technologies such as mixed reality, block chain and AI. After spending the first half of his career in Japan and Silicon Valley, James moved to Vancouver, BC in 2010 to co-found and be the CEO of Roadhouse Interactive, a mobile gaming studio that grew to 180 people at its peak. He is currently Chief Strategy Officer at AMPD (CSE: AMPD), a company focused on developing high-performance compute and cloud infrastructure solutions to properly cater to the needs of low-latency applications.

Ziva Co-founder & CEO, James Jacobs, is an Academy Award winning VFX artist with over 25 years of expertise as a Technical Director and Software Engineer. James has held leadership positions at the world’s top VFX and animation studios, including Weta Digital, Digital Domain, Dreamworks, Mr. X and Method Studios. He has received critical acclaim for his professional contributions to blockbusters such as Avatar, Avengers: Age of Ultron, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Prometheus, and King Kong.

In 2015, Jacobs co-founded Ziva Dynamics, a technology company dedicated to solving the most challenging and high-value character obstacles within the media & entertainment space. Ziva technology is considered the gold standard for creature work across Hollywood, and now, Ziva is tackling the real-time game industry.

John-Mark Gibbons started out in Creature FX and Rigging after completing the Animation and Visual Effects course at the Vancouver Film School. JM worked at MPC, Rainmaker Entertainment, ILM, and Hybride in this capacity on a number of notable projects including The Mandalorian, Aladdin, Thor: Ragnarok, The Mummy and Valerian.

He transitioned out of his Senior Rigging Artist role in 2019, to pursue his passion for development. JM currently works at Digital Domain as an Animation and Rigging TD, where he builds and maintains various tools for the rigging and animation teams.

In the past couple years, JM has been exploring Machine Learning and its untapped potential for rigging and animation.

Philippe Pasquier is an associate professor at the Simon Fraser University School for Interactive Arts and Technology, in Vancouver, where he directs the Metacreation Lab for Creative AI. Philippe leads a research-creation program around generative systems for creative tasks. As such, he is a scientist specialized in artificial intelligence, a multidisciplinary artist, an educator, and a community builder. His contributions range from theoretical research in multi-agent systems, computational creativity, creative AI and machine learning, to applied artistic research and practice in digital art, computer music, as well as interactive and generative art.

Philippe's artistic work has been shown in prominent venues on all five continents, including at Ars Electronica (Austria), Les Bains Numériques (France), Centre Pompidou (France), Earzoom festival (Slovenia), GMEA (France), IRCAM (France), ISEA2012 (Turkey), ISEA2014 (Dubai), ISEA2016 (Honk Kong), ISEA2017 (Columbia), Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal (Canada), Mutek Festival (Canada), and Plus One Gallery (USA).

Sang Mah has enjoyed a multi-faceted career in digital media, encompassing content creation, research and development, and private public partnerships. She is currently Managing Director at Shocap Entertainment, an extended reality entertainment production company exploring new ways to tell stories that reach audiences in unique forms by combining the language, conventions, and mediums of live theatre, film, animation, and video games. Shocap is founded by Lifelike & Believable Animation Design and Animatrik Film Design with a debut project LiViCi for live and virtual circus. Prior to her current role, Sang spent eight years with a national non-profit organization supporting industry-academic collaborations and consortiums across all disciplines. Other former roles include Director of Interactive at Bardel Entertainment, and executive roles with local tech start-ups. Since 2019, Sang has also been a member of the Spark CG Leadership Committee.

Coming soon.